A full plate of heart and hearty eats.
In this culinary confessional from the acclaimed author, it’s less about the kitchen and more about the yarns.
Writing a compelling food memoir is a delicate act; the recipes have to live up to the memories they evoke. In the hands of prolific author Hood (Morningstar: Growing Up with Books, 2017, etc.), the stories themselves are the main dish—but the food still has to be delicious. “I grew up eating. A lot,” she writes at the beginning. “As the great food writer M.F.K. Fisher said, ‘First we eat, then we do everything else.’ That describes my childhood home.” From the kitchen of her Italian grandmother Gogo through her career as a flight attendant, a seemingly perfect American suburban existence, the death of a child, divorce, and fairy tale–like second chance at true romance, Hood recalls each moment through the meals she was preparing, recipes both great and, well, not-so-great. The good ones include her family’s traditional meatballs: “The secret to [the] meatballs is how you roll them, a skill my father could never master. Neither could I.” The bad ones include her father’s scrambled eggs made with sugar. Then there are the heartbreaking ones: the “doctored” ramen Hood makes on the anniversary of her 5-year-old daughter Gracie’s death (which she movingly chronicled in her 2008 book, Comfort). “It still hits me when I see seckel pears in the grocery store,” she writes. “Little blonde girls in glasses. Hear the Beatles singing ‘Eight Days a Week.’ The sharp stab of a memory rises to the surface out of nowhere.” But her ramen, featuring a poached egg, butter, and American cheese, helps. While some of the stories feel redundant, with repeated bits of history rephrased, when Hood is focused on her prose, it’s like a classic recipe—all the flavors sing.
A full plate of heart and hearty eats.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-24950-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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